Confluent Expands Leadership Team With Four Key Hires as Stream Processing Initiatives Gain Enterprise Momentum

Amid Burgeoning Apache Kafka Adoption, Confluent Adds New Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing
Officer, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Vice President of Business Development.

PALO ALTO, Calif.—July 14, 2016‚—Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, today announced new additions to its leadership team with Cheryl Dalrymple as chief financial officer, Luanne Dauber as chief marketing officer, Todd Barnett as vice president of worldwide sales and Jabari Norton as vice president of business development.

The expansion of the executive team will enable Confluent to scale operations, drive new revenue streams and grow its customer base as the demand for enterprise Kafka support soars. According to a recent Kafka community survey, nearly seven of ten (68%) Kafka users surveyed plan to incorporate more stream processing over the next six to 12 months, and 65 percent of responding organizations plan to hire employees with Kafka skills in the next 12 months as the number of applications using Kafka continues its upward trajectory.

“Kafka is quickly becoming a mission-critical part of a company’s infrastructure. As more businesses expand how they use stream processing, the need for commercial products and support around Kafka becomes urgent,” said Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder of Confluent. “We’re excited to bring on four incredibly smart, seasoned Silicon Valley veterans in Cheryl, Luanne, Todd and Jabari—all are proven leaders with impressive business vision who will be instrumental in helping to guide Confluent into a new chapter.”

• Cheryl Dalrymple, chief financial officer: Dalrymple has spent the past 20 years serving as CFO for a number of privately held venture-backed companies and a multi-billion dollar public company. Prior to Confluent, she was CFO of Polyvore (acquired by Yahoo!), AdMob (acquired by Google), Digital Chocolate, Nextance Inc. (acquired by Trilogy Group), Oblix Inc. (acquired by Oracle) and Lexis Nexis. With experience scaling high-growth companies and managing international expansion, Dalrymple leads all aspects of Confluent financial, people, recruiting and legal operations.
• Luanne Dauber, chief marketing officer: With nearly two decades of experience in product management, product marketing, sales and leadership within the enterprise technology industry, Dauber is adept at building and scaling teams of high performers, creating new go-to-market opportunities and executing in high-growth environments. She joins Confluent from Pure Storage and is responsible for developing and driving Confluent’s global marketing strategy.
• Todd Barnett, vice president of worldwide sales: Barnett has 19 years of sales experience building and leading world class sales teams, working with a range of early stage technology companies including Acquia, one of the fastest growing open source companies in history, Aperture (acquired by Emerson), Systinet (Acquired by Mercury Interactive) and others. With a strong track record for creating momentum-driven sales models that expand both the mid-market and enterprise customer base, Barnett is responsible for expanding the Confluent sales team and driving global sales.
• Jabari Norton, vice president of business development: A veteran sales and business development leader with a successful 20-year track record of growing early-stage startup companies to successful outcomes, Norton has expertise in building sales teams and developing go-to-market strategies for SMB, public sector and enterprise teams while at MapR, ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco), Qualys (IPO in 2012), MessageOne (acquired by Dell) and Postini (acquired by Google). Norton is responsible for driving business development and partner activities for Confluent.

“Confluent has experienced strong growth as Kafka usage continues to accelerate,” said Neha Narkhede, CTO and co-founder of Confluent. “Organizations of all sizes and industries are embracing Kafka-powered solutions to take advantage of data as it enters their systems, and we’re thrilled to add these talented individuals to the team as we continue to build on our mission to help businesses understand and act on their data in real time.”

About Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open source technology that acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. Apache Kafka is key data infrastructure that can serve as a single central nervous system, transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an organization.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, enables organizations to harness business value from stream data. Confluent Platform manages the barrage of stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides various industries, from retail, logistics and manufacturing, to financial services and online social networking, a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline that enables applications ranging from large volume data integration to big data analysis with Hadoop to real-time stream processing. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.

Jill Reed or Anna Vaverka
Highwire PR for Confluent
confluent@highwirepr.com
(415) 963-4174, ext. 5